by Diana Palmer
“Look, I didn’t mean to offend you, or accuse your father of anything,” Jackson said slowly. “It’s just pretty damned unusual for anyone to be so generous.”
“Well, he’s a pretty damned unusual man. Perhaps you should meet him before you judge him the way you judged me.”
Jackson winced inwardly when that remark struck home, but he refused to let her sidetrack him. “It’s not that simple.”
“Why not? You’ve accepted corporate donations before, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, and sometimes that’s hurt us more than it’s helped us. We’ve depended on the white man’s charity for too long. At some point we’ve got to start depending on ourselves and solve our own problems.”
“And you think this is that point?” she demanded.
“It’s as good as any,” Jackson shot back. “I don’t want these kids to think all they have to do to get what they want is whine to some rich white guy about how poor they are. I want them to understand they’ve got to work for it.”
“That’s a noble sentiment, but how are they going to work if they don’t have the skills to get jobs that will pay them a living wage?” Jabbing her finger toward the van, she said, “There are jobs in those boxes. And not just for the kids. Some of the unemployed adults could learn to use those computers while the kids are in school.”
“It’s still charity, damn it. We’ll never regain our pride as a people until we learn to provide for our own needs. There’s a principle involved here.”
“If you want to use a principle, try the one that says if you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. That’s all my dad’s trying to do here. And I don’t think it’s the people’s pride you’re worried about, Jackson. It’s your own.”
“That’s not true.” He shoved his hands into his pockets to stop himself from shaking her senseless. Why the hell did she always have to make such a big deal out of everything? “It’s a question of values. Indian values, which you obviously can’t understand.”
“Because I’m an apple?” She snorted in disgust. “Please try to explain it to me, and I’ll do my best to follow along.”
“It’s looking for a quick fix. Taking the easy way out. Whatever you call it, it does nothing to build character.”
“You think poverty does?”
Jackson closed his eyes for a moment and sucked in a deep breath. Beating down this woman’s arguments was like swatting mosquitoes in a swamp. Every time you squashed one, three more appeared to suck your blood.
“The point I’m trying to make,” he said, opening his eyes and glaring at her, “is that real Indians, real Northern Cheyenne, are more concerned with values and character and the long-term survival of our tribe than we are with chasing the almighty dollar. That’s why we haven’t built a casino here. Another good example is the way our cousins over at the Lame Deer reservation handled the coal companies a few years ago.”
Maggie crossed her arms over her chest and leaned one shoulder against the building. “What did they do?”
“They weren’t much better off economically than we are now, but they’re sitting on one of the world’s biggest coal deposits,” Jackson explained. “Nobody paid any attention to it until the energy crisis hit back in the seventies. Then, all of a sudden, the coal companies and power companies started offering them millions of dollars for the privilege of strip-mining on the reservation. Can you imagine how tempting it was for them to grab that money and let Mother Earth take care of herself?”
Maggie nodded “But they didn’t?”
Jackson shook his head. “Nope. There was a big legal hassle, because the tribal council had already signed leases, on the advice of the BIA. But when they saw what was happening to the environment a few miles north of the reservation, at Colstrip, the tribe raised hell until they got those leases canceled. If they ever do develop their energy resources, it’ll be on their own terms, and in a way that won’t destroy their land.”
“That’s fascinating,” Maggie said. “But I still don’t see why you’re being so pigheaded about the computers. They’re not going to harm the environment or anything else.”
“It’s the principle, Maggie. Accepting this huge gift will not help us learn to manage our own resources, any more than taking the coal companies’ money would have helped our cousins learn to manage theirs. If our kids need computers, then the tribe should find a way to provide them.”
She studied him for so long, he began to hope he’d finally gotten through to her. Then she dashed his hopes with a firm shake of her head.
“You couldn’t find time to confront Ed Reese for the kids. How long will they have to wait for the tribe to help them? Until it’s too late to graduate with the rest of their class?”
“Probably. But it won’t be the end of the world. They can get their GED certificates and still go to college.”
“Oh, yeah? And how will they feel about it, Jackson? Don’t you think they’ll feel cheated? Damn it, it’s not fair.”
“Grow up, will you?” Jackson snapped. “Life is rarely fair for anyone, much less Indians.”
“But this time it could be,” she insisted. “Those kids have earned their diplomas. Denying them the chance to walk across that stage with their classmates is only going to teach them that their hard work won’t be rewarded. The only thing it will motivate them to do is give up. Can’t you see that?”
Jackson didn’t want to, but when she put it that way, he had to admit she might have a point. Graduation night was always one of the worst nights of the year for underage drinking on the res. Last year, five Laughing Horse kids had been killed in an alcohol-related car accident. Grudgingly giving in to the inevitable, he fished his keys out of his pocket and beckoned to Harvey to start unloading.
“All right,” he said as he unlocked the door. “You win this time, but don’t solicit any other donations unless you clear it with the tribal council first.”
“No problem. I didn’t solicit this one. But if I ever get the urge, I’ll leave it up to the real Indians. God knows I wouldn’t want to taint anyone with my inferior white values.”
Surprised at the pain he detected behind her sarcasm, Jackson shot her a quick look. Oh, man, her chin was trembling, and her long eyelashes were moving at top speed, undoubtedly blinking back tears. She always fought him so fiercely, he tended to forget the possibility of hurting her feelings.
She turned her back to him, yanked the door open wide and flipped down the doorstop for Harvey. Then she stepped inside, switched on the lights and marched down the hall to the tutoring center. Cursing under his breath, Jackson hurried after her.
When he entered the room, she was systematically pulling chairs away from the study tables. He cleared his throat. If she heard him, she ignored him.
“Look,” he said, approaching her with a tentative smile. “I didn’t mean anything personal.”
She shoved a chair into his path, but didn’t speak. He set the chair aside and, stepping closer, put his hand on her shoulder. She jerked away as if he’d stabbed her with a needle.
“Hey,” he protested. “I’m trying to apologize for whatever I said that hurt your feelings.”
Refusing even to look at him, she yanked another chair out of the way. “Forget it. Thanks for unlocking the door. I’ll handle things from here.”
“You said you were going to put me to work.”
“I changed my mind.”
“It’s not like you to hold a grudge, Maggie.”
“How would you know?”
“We’ve fought before, and you never did. It’s one of the things I like about you.”
She shot him a disbelieving glare. “Yeah, right. Why don’t you be honest, Mr. Hawk, and admit you don’t like me at all?”
“Because it’s not true.” He walked around the end of the table, smiling to himself when she straightened to her full height and faced him, like a boxer bracing for the next round. Well, fi
ne. He’d rather have her come out swinging at him than see her in tears. “You want to tell me what I said that upset you so much?”
“No. Go away. I’ve got work to do.”
As if to prove her point, Harvey entered the room, pushing a dolly loaded with boxes. “Where do you folks want these?”
Maggie pointed to the nearest wall. “Just stack them over there, Harvey.”
Jackson waited for the other man to leave, then approached her again. “Come on, out with it. It won’t be much fun touring the res together if you’re mad at me.”
“I’ve changed my mind about that, too. Thanks for the offer, but I’d prefer to drive myself.”
“Don’t even think about it,” he said, feeling his temper starting to heat up again. “This is rough, desolate country. You’ve got no business being out there alone.”
She opened her mouth as if she would argue the point. Fortunately, Al Black Bird walked into the room, cutting her off before she could get out a syllable.
“What’s goin’ on in here?” the big tribal policeman asked.
Maggie gave him a brief explanation, then went back to banging chairs around.
“Did you need something, Al?” Jackson asked.
Al tipped his baseball cap back and stuck his hands in his jeans pockets. “Yeah. Somethin’s happened I think you’d better be in on, Jackson.”
“What is it?”
Al glanced at Maggie, then raised an eyebrow at Jackson, as if asking whether or not he should talk in front of her. Jackson nodded.
“George Sweetwater was huntin’ rabbits in the brush about ten miles past your place this mornin’,” Al said. “He found some bones out there, and he thinks they’re human.”
Staring at his friend, Jackson said, “Human bones?”
“Yeah. An arm and a hand.” Al shrugged his beefy shoulders. “George said they look like they’ve been there for years. There’s an old burial ground out that way, but I couldn’t tell from his description whether the bones came from there. If they didn’t, we could be lookin’ at a homicide.”
“Any idea who it would be?”
“Nope. We don’t have any outstanding missing-persons reports on file. But I think you should come check it out with me. It never hurts to have a credible witness, you know?”
“Go ahead, Jackson,” Maggie said quietly. “I can handle the rest of this.”
He didn’t doubt she could handle damn near anything, but it didn’t feel right to leave her with this dispute unresolved.
“Really,” she insisted. “I’ll just set up a couple of the computers, and let Sara and the kids help with the rest.”
Al lumbered to the doorway. “Let’s go, Hawk. I want to get out there before the Feds do. I don’t want them touchin’ anything until we can figure out if those bones belong to an ancestor. I want to call in your old pal, Tracy Roper, ’cause I know she’ll shoot straight with us.”
“I’ll be right there,” Jackson answered. Turning to Maggie, he said, “Let’s meet at my office at one tomorrow. We can finish sorting this out then, okay?”
He walked to the doorway and turned for one last look at Maggie. She stood there, staring at him with those big dark eyes of hers. There was a wounded sort of vulnerability about her that reached down into his chest and gave his heartstrings a hard yank. He gulped, searching for something to say that would make things all right between them again.
He finally settled for an unsatisfying but practical warning. “Don’t turn on more than three computers at one time until we can get an electrician in here to check out the wiring.”
Her only response was a nod. Biting back a frustrated curse, Jackson left. Al waited for him at the front door, grinning like he’d just won a medal for marksmanship.
“Whoo-whee,” he said. “That was some tension between you and the Little Fed in there.”
Jackson brushed past the policeman. “Shut up, Al.”
Al caught up with him in two strides. “Oooh, touchy, are we? You got the hots for her, or what?”
Jackson scowled at him over the top of the four-wheel-drive wagon that served as a cruiser. “Mind your own damn business.”
Al slid into the driver’s seat and fired the engine while Jackson climbed in on the other side. “Can’t say as I blame you,” he said, as if Jackson hadn’t spoken. “That Maggie’s somethin’ else. I really like the way she smiles, you know? Kinda lights up the whole room. She sure wasn’t smilin’ at you, though, buddy. Whatcha do to her?”
“Damned if I know,” Jackson muttered. Then he put on his sunglasses, dragged the brim of his hat down over his face, crossed his arms over his chest and slid down until his head rested on the back of the seat.
“Hey, if you don’t wanna talk, all you have to do is say so.” Chuckling, Al grabbed the microphone, radioed his position to the office and drove away from the curb.
Jackson tuned him out, his thoughts immediately returning to Maggie. Damn it, he knew better than to let a woman manipulate him with tears. So why did the memory of Maggie struggling not to shed them make him feel so stinkin’ guilty? Especially when she was too immature to just come out and tell him what he’d done? Talk about manipulative!
But the hurt in her eyes and in her voice had gone deeper than that. Just picturing the way she’d looked before he left made him feel like he’d kicked a defenseless puppy. Which was about the most ridiculous notion he could imagine.
Maggie was hardly defenseless. She’d taken on both Reese and Baldwin this morning, and she’d still had plenty of steam left to rake him over the proverbial coals. That woman could take on a tank and win, for God’s sake.
The funny thing was, in the everyday scheme of things, she didn’t come across as a combative sort of person. Too many people on the res liked her for that to be true. In fact, other than their first meeting, when he’d deliberately provoked her, the only times he’d seen her temper flare had been connected with her efforts to help the teenagers.
He could hardly blame her for that; in fact, he admired her protectiveness toward those kids tremendously. Because of it, he’d actually started to look forward to showing her the rest of the res, in spite of his ambivalent feelings toward her.
Maybe his ambivalence was the key to this whole mess. He’d been trying so hard not to like her more than he should, he’d convinced her he didn’t like her at all. Aw, hell, now that he thought about it, it wasn’t hard to see how she’d come to that conclusion.
He’d treated her like she was nothing but trouble on the hoof from the beginning. Even when it had become perfectly clear that she was only trying to help, he’d questioned everything she did, not to mention the integrity of her boss and her father. And he’d been damn suspicious and condescending, because…well, because he was scared spitless to trust his reactions to her.
It hadn’t really been necessary to make such a big stink about those computers. While he believed wholeheartedly in the principle of self-reliance, he could bend a principle when circumstances warranted it; building self-esteem in the tribe’s young people warranted almost any amount of bending.
He could have just said thank-you on behalf of the tribe and accepted Maggie’s father’s generous gift. But had he? No, he’d thrown it back in her face, and made all kinds of nasty remarks about a man she obviously loved a lot.
It was time to stop acting like a jackass. As Uncle Frank had said, women like Maggie didn’t come along every day. He’d fought his attraction to her for as long as he could, but he might as well admit it was no use.
Maggie challenged him, intrigued him, infuriated him and confused the hell out of him. If he allowed himself to get close to her, she might well break his heart. But damn it all, whenever he was with her, he felt more alive than he had in years. And somehow, some way, he just had to find out what made her tick.
Six
When the hollow sound of Jackson’s bootheels hitting the tile floor had faded away, Maggie swallowed at the lump in her throat. Then she gr
itted her teeth, squared her shoulders and went back to work. She would not cry over that man. And she was not going to tour the res with him, either. She’d rather get lost out in the boondocks and never be heard from again than accept the tiniest scrap of help from that arrogant jerk.
By tomorrow she would have her emotions back under control, and she’d tell him what he could do with his proposition and where he could put his real Indian values. With anger fueling her energy, she rearranged the room, set up three of the systems and loaded the software onto the computers’ hard drives, finishing as the school buses arrived from Whitehorn.
A moment later, the building’s main doors crashed open and an excited babble of voices filled the hallway. Wanda Weasel Tail burst into the room, followed by a herd of other teenagers.
“Miss Schaeffer! Miss Schaeffer!” Wanda called, gleefully racing over to Maggie. “You’ll never guess what happened today. We got library books!”
“I don’t know what you did to those librarians,” Nina Walks Tall said, “but I wish I’d a been there to see it.”
Janie Brown Bear dumped her backpack on the big round study table, headed after the other girls, then stopped and did a double take when she spotted one of the computers. Her mouth fell open, and an awed expression came over her face as she looked around the room. “Hey, where did all this stuff come from?”
The other girls stopped chattering for a second, shooting irritated glances at Janie. She pointed at a gleaming monitor. Wanda and Nina followed the direction of her finger. Then, as if they’d communicated some signal only teenagers could hear, all three girls started jumping up and down and shrieking in delight.
More kids rushed in to see what was going on. Their surprised and happy shouts brought people running from all over the building. Luckily, Sara Lewis was among the newcomers. After assuring the crowd that everyone would eventually have a chance to use the machines, she shooed out the folks who were supposed to be somewhere else with the skill of a born organizer.